Locations are marked as unverified if their position, identity, or existence is disputed. Many locations imported from tree inventories are marked as unverified because their edibility is uncertain (for example, "Pear" could be either an edible or decorative variety). Users are encouraged to travel to these locations and report their findings.

We enforce a taxonomy of edible types to keep the map organized and searchable. Novel types submitted by users are highlighted on the map as pending until they are added to the taxonomy or merged with an existing type. Some proposed types are so unique or ambiguous that they persist as unapproved indefinitely.

Falling Fruit aspires to be the most comprehensive and open geographic dataset of urban edibles. While our users explore, edit, and add locations using our map, we comb the known universe for pre-existing datasets and import them directly into the database, uniting the efforts of foragers, foresters, and freegans everywhere. If you know of a dataset we've missed, please let us know! You can also help us with the import process by formatting the data using the import template. Note that since imports must be performed manually, all changes to the original data made after the import are not reflected on Falling Fruit.

Imported datasets

Datasets imported into Falling Fruit fall into two main categories. "Community maps" are built by foragers and freegans as they peruse their communities for things to eat. We are indebted to the hardworking citizen-cartographers who have compiled this data. "Tree inventories" are compiled by cities, universities, and other institutions wishing to better document and care for their trees. We mine these vast datasets for food-producing species and add them to the map. To help us map your neighborhood fruit trees, contact your school or city urging them to share their tree inventory with us.

Each dataset is listed by name, number of locations, and date imported. Expanding each row reveals further details about the data, the import process, and the license governing how the data may be used.

Details

Type

Name

Locations

Date imported

Map of fruit trees planted by Community Fruit Trees in and around Orlando, Florida, USA. Each tree is publicly owned and easily accessible for anyone to pick from. A sign next to the tree invites people to enjoy the fruit.

Inventory of public and privately-maintained trees in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. The data – as imported – was last updated on 2017-08-30. Special thanks to Myriam Lavoie for assisting in the import process.

A map of edible plants in Somerville, Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA was submitted by Peter Montague. "Some of the info came from your site, some from local .gov sites but mostly first hand foraging." Duplicates were manually searched for and removed after import, and the existing location updated as necessary.

Locations from an additional map of community gardens, orchards, and parkland were added manually.

Inventory of street trees in Winterthur, Switzerland by the Vermessungsamt der Stadt Winterthur (Survey Office of the City of Winterthur).

Copyright belongs to the City of Winterthur, and is used here with their permission. For uses not in the spirit of Falling Fruit (non-commercial, attribution, share-alike), please contact the data's owner.

Groups of shrubs mapped as polygons in Warsaw, Poland by the Warsaw Environmental Protection Bureau (Biuro Ochrony Środowiska Warszawy). Since Falling Fruit does not currently support polygons, polygon centroids were computed and used instead.

The data is in the public domain. For details, see https://api.um.warszawa.pl/.

Groups of trees mapped as polygons in Warsaw, Poland by the Warsaw Environmental Protection Bureau (Biuro Ochrony Środowiska Warszawy). Since Falling Fruit does not currently support polygons, polygon centroids were computed and used instead.

The data is in the public domain. For details, see https://api.um.warszawa.pl/.

Fruit trees encountered in villages and along river banks on a packrafting expedition down the Nam Ou River in northern Laos to document dam construction and a landscape and people in rapid transition. Many of these sources are destined to become flooded fruit.

Tree inventory for San Diego County, California, USA, as exported from the San Diego Tree Map on 15 April 2013 (the current export feature does not work). Data from the City of San Diego was removed, since it was imported previously. The remaining data included crowdsourced data and data from the following cities: Carlsbad, Chula Vista, Coronado, El Cajon, Imperial Beach, La Mesa, Oceanside, Poway, Santee, Solano Beach, and Vista. Many entries had incomplete (or truncated) species names - these were manually parsed in an effort to recover whatever could be salvaged.

Asheville Tree Map is a collaboration of government, nonprofits, businesses and individuals to build an inventory of the urban forest in Asheville, North Carolina, USA. Data exported on 20:56 July 23 2014 UTC.

An inventory of trees in parks and right of ways in Austin, Texas, USA by the city's Urban Forestry Program. The inventory is the result of a merge of multiple datasets last updated between 2008 and 2014.

A directory of dumpsters in cities across North America, with a heavy emphasis on New York City, maintained by the city's freegan group (http://freegan.info/). Locations were georeferenced from the word descriptions and addresses, then manually reviewed and refined. Corporate store locators and Google satellite and street views were used extensively to find and verify locations.

The maps made by Matthias Gutfeldt for Brooklyn and Manhattan from Freegan.info data in January 2007 (http://www.gutfeldt.ch/matthias/freegan/freegan-ny.php) were used to locate certain stores.

Dumpsters in New York City and Brooklyn, New York georeferenced from the user submitted data on Trashwiki's (http://trashwiki.org/) entry for New York City. Locations already imported from Freegan.info were removed.

Opportunities for free food in and around Rochester, New York by the volunteer editors at RocWiki (rocwiki.org). Bruegger's locations (reportedly as generally good for diving) were added in bulk and tagged as 'Unverified'.

Dumpsters in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Locations already added from Trashwiki (http://trashwiki.org/en/Vancouver) were removed. Several locations were obviously incorrect and only some could be found based on the description.

According to Tine Ningal, the study's primary author, only field-surveyed street trees are included. "The trees we have digitized into the GIS database (trees in parks, privates gardens and residences) but have not identified are not included."

Fields "Species" and "Species2" were sometimes inconsistent. These locations, in addition to those of uncertain edibility due to the lack of species-level identification, were tagged as "Unverified."

Dumpsters in Phoenix, Arizona. From "Practical Trash," a 2010 project by students Shawndrea Corbin, Emily Timm, and Dustin Volz at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication - http://cronkitezine.asu.edu/spring2010/dumpsterdiving/.

Mapping by the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies' Urban Resources Initiative (http://environment.yale.edu/uri/.http://environment.yale.edu/uri/) of trees planted in association with Community Greenspace groups in North Haven, Connecticut (http://environment.yale.edu/uri/programs/community-greenspace/).

GreenSkills interns from local high schools are continuously updating the inventory with support from the U.S. Forest Service and the Robbins DeBeaumont Foundation. The imported dataset was retrieved on April 24, 2013.

A comprehensive tree inventory completed on the University of Texas at Austin main campus in spring 2007 by Landscape Services (http://www.utexas.edu/facilities/services/land.html). Southern live oak (
Quercus virginiana) were left out because they accounted for half of all trees on campus.

The City of Goshen conducted a public tree inventory of its street and park trees in 2008-2010. This data was acquired from the city by members of Transition Goshen (www.transitiongoshen.org) for the sole purpose of making the data public on Falling Fruit.

Data collected 2006-2009. Since the data does not list scientific names, it is not possible to know whether some groups may contain the occasional species of interest (eg. Linden, Elm). Since fruit trees were in their own category ("Fruit tree"), these others were discarded.

Did not include the urban farms and community gardens and vacant lots that did not mention foraging opportunities. Public · Open Collaboration · 14,060 views
Created on Feb 16, 2009 · By Daniel Z. Bair · Updated Dec 19, 2012

Some of the locations were digitized manually from the topo map said to have been made by the folks at Fallen Fruit. The rest were pulled from fruitmap.sk, which already had the data, but only for a subset of the species represented.